The storage of containers, boxes, and other storage items has always presented the warehouse engineer with difficult choices. One objective of the warehouse engineer is to store as many items as possible in a given storage space, while still being able to provide normal and efficient access thereto. The problem with high density storage design is that the shortening of the height of the tiers of adjacent pallet racks provides densification of materials within a given floor space at the expense of severely restricting access to the containers disposed upon the racks.
It is not uncommon to find that material handling personnel are often thwarted in their attempts to access containers disposed behind other containers in a row of containers stored on a given pallet rack tier.
In recent times, flow tracks have become popular as a means of loading and unloading containers on pallet racks. These flow tracks allow materials to move easily over the rollers of the tracks, thus making it convenient to load and unload containers. However, it is still a requirement of accessibility that these pallet rack tiers be spaced a minimum height distance in order to allow for ease of flow and for proper handling.
One of the current disadvantages with the present use of flow tracking, however, is that the tracks must be bolted to the pallet rack frames for support. This is both a laborious setup inconvenience and a waste of tier height space. The height of the flow tracks themselves increase overall height of the storage tiers. The addition of only a few inches to each tier eliminates a whole tier after only approximately five tiers have been constructed.
The present invention features a new type of flow track that has an extremely low profile. The low profile flow track of this invention requires no mechanical attachment to the pallet rack beams, and adds only approximately one inch to the overall height of the tier space allocated for the stored articles. The low profile flow track is safely secured when dropped into place on the form beam of the pallet rack. The low profile flow track is merely dropped upon the support beam without requiring tooling, fasteners or attachments of any kind.
The current invention comprises a flow track that has an end plate positioned just one inch on top of the horizontal support surface of the pallet rack beam. The end plate is secured to the sides of the flow track. The ends of the side plates are specially contoured to provide support on the L-shaped pallet rack beam. The side plates are curvilinear and wrap about the step profile of the pallet rack beam to allow the track to rest above and below the horizontal top surface of the beam. In this fashion, the overall height of the flow track is diminished with respect to its position upon the tier.
In addition to presenting a minimum height profile to the tier, the end plate of the flow track functions as the end stop, and also provides means to present a name plate. The end plate has upper and lower slots that accommodate and support an identification insert.